


fill in the holes you've made

by sxldato



Category: Mr. Robot (TV)
Genre: AU: Everything Isn't Fucked, Breaking the Fourth Wall, Delusions, Drug Addiction, Drug Withdrawal, Father Figures, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Mental Instability, Squick, Unreliable Narrator, Vomiting, elliot is a disaster protect this child, ergo elliot talks to you in the narrative, except this is in third person so that's weird, i can't tag more specific than that or else spoilers happen, this is just gross and sad i'm sorry, this whole thing is weird
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-13
Updated: 2015-09-13
Packaged: 2018-04-20 15:13:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4792298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sxldato/pseuds/sxldato
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Morphine withdrawal is really, really messy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	fill in the holes you've made

**Author's Note:**

> the only thing i can focus on about this series without rendering myself non-functional is the fact that elliot's withdrawal was not up to par with my standards of things being disgusting, so i fixed that.  
> but don't talk to me about anything else about this show seriously fuck this  
> my friend told me to watch it and of course, classic me, i bulldozed through the entire thing in three days aND LET ME TELL YOU SOMETHING. MR. ROBOT IS NOT A SHOW YOU SHOULD BULLDOZE THROUGH.  
> remember when i said i wouldn't be writing as much b/c school started lmao i'm not responsible  
> i don't even. i don't even know what to say about this. i'm emotionally traumatized. this was too much  
> i beta read this you're fucking welcome (it's still a mess though but that's the style i was going for so who even cares)  
> title is from 'Thistle & Weeds' by Mumford & Sons (i was gonna pull something from 'Brother' by Matt Corby but that hurt too damn much tbh)  
> ((SPOILERS)) Mr. Robot is real in this fic because I'm living in denial about episode 9 and 10, goodbye ((END SPOILERS))

The numbers glaring on the digital clock blur and he can’t tell the time. It wouldn’t matter either way, not really. It’s liquidated, minutes running into hours into sunsets into stars into dark city moons, blocked out by pollution-powered clouds.

The chills wracking his body are making his legs cramp up; if he’s lucky, his muscles will tear and his nerves will stop responding, but that’s not how bodies work, he’s pretty sure. A part of him-- the part that’s trying to keep a safe distance from all this, that’s holding it together the same way someone stuck under a bus holds it together-- thinks maybe he’ll split like string, rip at the seams and tangle up.

He pants through his nose, breathing heavily against the sheets, his bare and sweat-slicked stomach rising and falling like a fish out of water. He’s a fish out of water. This must be what it feels like, right? Not being able to breathe, drawing each breath and finding your atmosphere has morphed into poison.

Turning over puts strain on his spine, a deep-rooted ache sprouting between each vertebra. He finds patterns in the stucco on the ceiling, watches lines of morphine form along the cracks. Even when he’s half-conscious his eyes play tricks on him.

Music washes through the walls from the next room and echoes in his ribcage. Except it's not music, it's his own heartbeat. He could keep the time that way if he wanted; counting the pulses, one hundred per minute, stacking up quick, and he wonders where all that blood goes.

His stomach clenches, and his legs are so sore that they couldn’t carry him to the toilet even if he tried. He’s weak, vulnerable; he’s never felt fear like this. It’s bitter on his tongue and it rings in his ears.

He doesn’t hear himself speak and he doesn’t hear anyone respond (he’s so alone, he’s so fucking alone) but the blankets are peeled from his body and he’s scooped up like a child, like he’s five years old again and his dad is putting him to bed while his mom smokes on the porch. That’s long gone, all of it. That father is six feet underground, and that boy is a reclusive morphine junkie who wishes he were, too.

Somewhere distant, outside this motel room and this anonymous town upstate, he remembers his aversion to contact. He’s got no clue where that went.

“Hey, kiddo.” Words roll over gravel, grating, a strange and warped comfort. “You with me?”

A groan rips from his throat and God, he wishes he hadn’t made a noise like that because he’s not dying, this isn’t forever, there’s a clear end to this in sight. He can’t complain about agony he’d brought on himself, or at least he _shouldn’t._

He’s not disoriented enough to not be ashamed by his choices. His humiliation threatens to swallow him up, shatter his bones.

The toilet seat is cold on his skin, and goosebumps prickle across his thighs as his pants are tugged down to his ankles. He sways, reaches out for the sink to steady himself, finds someone’s shoulder instead. His stomach contracts and twists and he doubles over to rest his head on his knees, fighting through the spasms in his guts and the nausea in his chest. His throat closes up and he chokes, tears burning his eyes. He hates this, he hates himself.

A set of fingers runs through his hair, methodical and slow. Gentle. He rifles through scrambled memories for the last time he’s been handled with this much care, breaking down the firewalls in his brain for something that isn’t his father, and there’s nothing. Like he’d keyboard-smashed into a search engine. Try different words, go broader, check spelling, _l-e-u-k-e-m-i-a—_ fuck, _fuck_ —

He falls from that second story window, and he’s only angry with himself when he hits the ground.

It’s hard to connect the pieces. It’s just pain and more pain and he thinks he might be throwing up on the tiled bathroom floor, or there might be an ice bucket under his head, or he might not be throwing up at all. He can’t be certain; he’s out of his mind. He doesn’t _know_ anything, only _thinks_ , only has maybes.

Noise-- is somebody talking? Do you know?

He can’t find you, and he can’t say he’s surprised. If he were you, he wouldn’t want to be around to see this, either.

“—look at me— and Jesus, here, wipe your nose—“

A bunch of tissues (toilet paper, it’s toilet paper, there aren’t goddamn _tissues_ in a pay-per-hour motel) are pressed into his hand, and he does as he’s told because there’s not much else he can do while his internal organs are joining together for an exodus via any available exit. 

“Want the newspaper?”

He digs through his lungs and pulls his vocal chords back up into his throat, torn and frayed as the rubber lining may be. “’S a joke, you’re joking.”

“Yeah, good call.” Someone is crouched low in front of him, square glasses pushed up onto his head, baseball cap gone, and holding the ice bucket. (It’s depressing, the fact one of his few blessings to count is that he didn’t make a mess of the floor, but withdrawal is never supposed to be clean and easy.)

His whole body aches and feels sticky with sweat. He should shower, probably, if he wasn’t positive he’d slip and crack his skull open.

“If you wanna wash up, you can. But take a bath or something—don’t want you falling.”

He hadn’t spoken, had he? Or is he just that transparent?

“I’ll drown,” he says.

“I would never let that happen.”

He’s still opposed to the idea because you can’t trust anybody, you really can’t, but he doesn’t object to the cold cloth wiping his face, cutting through the heat and the vertigo. He almost forgets that there’s more than this, that there’s a whole world he needs to save right outside the door. He almost lets that burden slip from his grasp. Almost.

“Stop worrying about it.” The cold cloth disappears and a pair of lips touches his forehead. “Besides, you gotta save yourself first, kiddo.” 

 

He isn’t scared when he jolts out of a dream only to find an empty room. No, this isn’t fear. Fear doesn’t crush him the way this does. He leaves it nameless for the sake of keeping it unofficial, like if he can’t label it, it’s not real.

He still shudders from lingering chills as he pulls his legs close to him. He’s glitching, his edges pixelated and fuzzy; there are too many bugs in his system, and he’s finally shutting down.

Shutting down, breaking apart, oozing out the cracks or melting through the damn mattress-- does it really matter? Do you care?

His thoughts taste bad at the back of his mouth, and they’re all blurring together. There are letters missing from the keyboard, jumbled sentences reducing to nothing but a mess of consonants, punctuation, numbers, ones and zeroes and ones and zeroes.

He’s not a one, he never was. Rotting apples don’t fall far from dead trees.

There’s that god-awful sensation, like someone’s taken a hammer to his ribs, because he’s sick and alone and he’ll die before he can save anybody, and he can’t pull through on his own, not this time.

“You’re not alone.” A few steps out of the shadows, turning the corner. Those eyes, bright and blue, framed by laugh lines. “I’m not going anywhere, kiddo. We’re in this to the end.”

There it is again: that strange familiarity, that feeling of home. He shoves it down. He’s flat broke and he can’t afford it. Instead, he releases some of the tension in his shoulders, breathes deep, wipes the tears from his cheeks and doesn’t look. Light sensitivity, you know, from the withdrawal. The blue hurts his eyes.

“Where—“

The old mattress springs creak with a new addition of weight, and the pillows are adjusted around him. “They got cabin fever, went out for some air.”

Guilt washes over him, stirs up nausea. “Are they mad?”

“Not your priority right now.” A glass of water is set on the bedside table. “Just do me a solid and rehydrate.”

His hands are shaky and he nearly drops the glass, but the water is a welcome shock to his throat, scratched raw from retching. It doesn’t settle well in his stomach, but he’s certain he has some time before it becomes a problem.

“Why didn’t you go with them?” _You_ did.

There’s a smile, haphazard and casual, and the laugh lines around his eyes crinkle. “Why would I?”

He’s still rattled from his dreams, can still hear the gunshots ringing through the air of that crack house, the wheels of a scooter against pavement, the automated voices of fsociety and the shrill arcade games. That’s his excuse for not understanding. He’s barely there, flickering in and out of his own focus, and this pain doesn’t feel like it’s going to stop until he’s emptied out, until his lungs and his liver and his heart are splattered at the bottom of the ice bucket, so it’s fine. He doesn’t need to understand why someone would stay.

 

He wouldn’t call this sleeping, because that translates a kind of peacefulness that is in no way present. It’s fitful bouts of unconsciousness with twitching limbs and tangled blankets, and he’s only pulled out of it when he has to scramble for the toilet or puke his guts out and then some.

He turns the wrong way once, throws up strings of bile and stomach lining onto the sweat-damp sheets, on himself. Jesus, he’s met rock bottom head-first. He's concussed, he's hurting, can't you take pity and give him a hit?

He’d be dead by now if he had to do this alone, he thinks, watching through clouded vision from one of the chairs as the bed is stripped down. At least now he has some more time before he has to bite the bullet. Except he’s not sure if that’s a good thing.

As fucked as he is, he’s never _actively_ wanted to die, not really. It’s more of a passive thing, occasional intrusive thoughts, the kind that normal people get. Like what would happen if he jumped onto the subway tracks, or if the traffic light turned red and he just kept driving, or if he did ninety milligrams of morphine instead of thirty. Things like that, normal things, and he never considers following through with any of them.

But now he’s kind of considering it, just so this can end faster.

“You’re not dying.” A new fitted sheet is being tugged over the edge of the mattress. “You look like it, and you probably feel like it, but you’re not, and I’m not gonna let you.”

He wants to puke again, the urge is there turning in his stomach, but it’s hollow and achy and it wouldn’t be productive. He looks away, settles for watching the hazy glow of the moon outside the window.

He never believed that story as a kid, the one about the man in the moon. Men in black and secret conspiracy orders were real, but he knows no one can live up there, so many miles away from everything, so isolated. He’s not _that_ crazy.

“I messed up.” His chin rests on his knees and he rocks back and forth a little even if it’s doing nothing to calm him down.

“Yeah, you did.” Hands brush over his shoulders, rest there for a moment. “And it’s okay. You know why?”

“No.”

“Because you’re not a fucking _machine_ , Elliot.”

He’d thought he’d known that, because it’s obvious that he’s a person and that he’s real, that these things he’s feeling are valid whether they make sense or not, and his mistakes are human, but it sounds different coming from someone else. It sounds more believable, more authentic-- not the way his therapist says it, repetitive and mechanical, just going through the motions. No, this feels real.

“You’re not Atlas, kiddo. You don’t have to hold up the whole world on your shoulders. That’s what the rest of us are here for, to divvy up that weight.”

He wants to keep looking at the moon, the stars winking at him like they're sharing a secret as old as time itself, but they might not be there at all. Maybe he’s just watching the thick, smoky clouds, and hoping something shows through, praying for some clarity.

(He should take his medication when they go back to the city—the legal kind, not the one that used to come to him in little glass tubes. His brain can’t be this muddled if he wants to rescue humanity from itself. Either way, he’s all out. That’s what got him into this, remember? He remembers.)

The sheets are crisp and clean when he climbs back under them. A cool hand meets his forehead, and he doesn’t flinch at the contact, and he doesn’t know why. With all the paranoia rolling through him, he should be coiled even tighter, not completely unwound. He’s a mess of contradictions; he should stop trying to figure himself out. There aren’t enough formulas or cheat codes for that.

“You’re like him,” he says, weary and worn-down.

“Who?”

“My dad.”

There are sounds of shifting, like he’s caused some sort of discomfort by mentioning his father.

“You wanna talk about him?”

He could get used to this—the soft touches and the gentle tone. He’s missed this, not having to worry about sharp edges or thorns.

“No… no, I don’t.”

He does anyway, because he’s tired of lying and pushing it down, because he needs to, because his _father_ needs him to. And this man—this man whose name he doesn’t know, who blends in with crowds so seamlessly, who’s pushed him off a pier and landed him in a hospital, who hides under baseball caps and stubble and ancient jackets, who searches for stories because he has none of his own—he listens.

“Don’t—“ his voice breaks, he’s been speaking so long. He hasn’t spoken this much in a long time, and he's damn tired. “Don’t leave me.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, kiddo.” Eyes, bright and blue, but he can look at them now without it hurting.

He lets himself sink into another fitful round of unconsciousness, holding tight to this man’s hand (that strange familiar feeling, like he’s home, he’s coming home), just in case he slips.

(But he’s not going anywhere.)

**Author's Note:**

> _I begged you to hear me, there's more than flesh and bones_   
>  _Let the dead bury the dead, they will come out in droves_   
>  _But take the spade from my hands and fill in the holes you've made_


End file.
